Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  In the middle seventies three former members of Philip Hobsbaum’s group, Lochhead, Gray and Kelman, were tutoring part-time for Glasgow University adult education department. It was Liz Lochhead who first read and showed her colleagues the story “Arabella” which starts here of the book you now hold. She had been given it when visiting a class of writers in the Vale of Leven, a shallow valley of small factory towns along the river flowing from Loch Lomond into the Clyde at Dumbarton Rock. If you enjoyed that story you will know why Lochhead, Gray and Kelman were greatly excited. Most writing classes produce at least one entertaining story which might have been published in days when fiction magazines half filled the station bookstalls. “Arabella” was better than those. We learned that the author had come recently to story-writing, and worked as a clerk and shop-steward in a local electric clock factory. She was twice married, once widowed, with two self-supporting children and three still at school. Our first reaction was to call her a natural writer, which on second thoughts was silly. Nobody writes naturally. It is an art which is learned. Those who do it best have continued teaching themselves after leaving school, and the main teaching method is enthusiastic reading.

  Agnes Owens had obviously read enough, and read intelligently enough, to clear her language of the secondhand phrases used by ordinary writers to disguise their lack of ideas. When Gray and Kelman read more of her work (for eventually they also visited the small class in the Vale) they felt she sometimes used too many adverbs, and Jim Kelman has been unremitting in his efforts to make her like Chekhov more and Graham Greene less; but tutoring, where Agnes was concerned, had little to do with the quality of her writing. Being new to writing, in a district where nearly every sort of industry was closing down, her response to those who liked her stories was, “So who will print it? And how much will they pay?” They had to teach her that if she steadily posted her work to a certain number of small magazines, always with a stamped addressed envelope for return, she might get two or three stories published in four or five years and be paid thirty or forty pounds. They had to teach her that the magazines most interested in new talent were liable to cease publication before printing her. They explained that Scotland's really famous writers – those whose stories and poems were referred to by critics and lecturers – had either some sort of unearned income or did hackwork for education and publicity establishments. They told her that in Britain those who feed and house themselves solely by writing have to turn out two or three paperback novels a year, novels which critics and lecturers ignore. They said they knew she was a writer like themselves, but they could not welcome her aboard a sturdy ship called HMS Literature. Such a ship exists, but is a work of communal imagination, and those who talk like captains of it are misleading or misled.

  Agnes Owens’s talent was too tough to be killed by learning that writing was not a full free life but just another sort of that daily life she knew like the back of her hand. In the next ten years she was paid thirty or forty pounds for a couple of magazine stories, and had a story accepted by an editor who vanished before printing it. She wrote radio plays which were returned by producers with letters expressing great interest – in the next play she sent them. Her first novel, Gentlemen of the West, was returned by a publisher who said he might consider printing it if a famous Scottish comedian said something about it which could be used as advertisement. She posted the typescript to the comedian who put it on that pile of unsolicited correspondence which no famous person has time to answer. Industry in the Vale of Leven started closing even faster than in the rest of Britain. Westclox Limited went into liquidation and Agnes did what our dynamic prime minister would do if the Thatcher family had to go on the dole: she hunted for part-time cleaning jobs. She worked for a while in the house of the comedian who had received her typescript a few years before, and got it back.

  Meanwhile Jim Kelman and Alasdair Gray, who had started writing ten and twenty years earlier than Agnes Owens, became luckier sooner. In 1983 Polygon Books, the Edinburgh University Press, published Kelman’s second collection of stories, Not Not While The Giro, and signed a contract for his second novel, The Busconductor Hines. Polygon is the only university press in Europe owned and run by the students. Perhaps because it does not need to make a profit it has recently become the most adventurous of small Scottish publishing houses, producing editions of native authors who are well known, but (from the viewpoint of publishers who will collapse if they make no profit) not well known enough. Kelman showed Gentlemen of the West to a Polygon editor who loved it, and Agnes’s first novel was published in the spring of 1984. By this time a collection of Gray’s stories had been issued in hardback by Canongate of Edinburgh and bought for paperback by King Penguin. A director of a London publishing house asked him if he had enough stories to make another collection. Gray said no. There was a handful of stories he had intended to build into another collection, but found he could not, as he had no more ideas for prose fictions. From now on he would write only frivolous things like plays or poems, and ponderous things like A History Of The Preface, or a treatise on The Provision Merchant As Agent Of Evil In Scottish Literature From Galt To Gunn. Even if his few unpublished stories were stretched by the addition of some prose portraits and poems they would still not amount to a book. The director asked Gray if he could suggest two other writers who would join him in a collection. And now you know how Lean Tales was made.

  Of Bill MacLellan*

  BILL MACLELLAN, PUBLISHER; born March 20, 1919, died October 16, 1996 the publisher, Bill MacLellan, aged 81, has died of a cerebral haemorrhage at Kello Hospital, Biggar, Lanarkshire. He leaves behind a widow, the concert pianist Agnes Walker, and two daughters. Between the start of his firm in 1941 and its bankruptcy in 1969 he had published original poetry by Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, W S Graham, George Campbell Hay, George Bruce, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Maurice Lindsay: also fiction by J F Hendrie, Edward Gaitens and Fionn MacColla: also plays by Ewan MacColl and Robert McLellan (no relative): also books of Scottish history, art and folklore, the most notable being the Dewar Manuscripts. This would give Bill MacLellan a place in any thorough history of Scottish letters, but no such history exists. Though he is mentioned in biographies and bibliographies of MacDiarmid, hardly anyone under the age of 35 remembers him and he has no entry in Chambers Scottish Biographical Dictionary or Who’s Who in Scotland.

  There are two reasons for this neglect. No prominent people in Scottish public life noticed him, apart from Hugh MacDiarmid who, despite being recognised in the early 1920s as Scotland’s greatest poet since Burns, was regarded by most people in public life as a troublemaker who they wanted to ignore. Only after the 1960s did a Scottish university get a department devoted to Scottish literature and which therefore needed MacDiarmid, but the academics who published critical editions of his works ignored the fact that MacLellan had published earlier anthologies of MacDiarmid’s poems, his long In Memoriam James Joyce, and the magazine Scottish Arts and Letters, three editions of which MacDiarmid edited in the late 1960s. When there appeared hardly any Scots publishers or journals cared for modern Scots arts and letters.

  The other reason was his absence of a business mind. His father was a Glasgow city councillor who ran a printing firm at 240 Hope Street, in the same block as the Theatre Royal. He died when Bill was 14. His mother continued the family business until he took it over at the age of 20, by which time he had attended Glasgow High School and the London School of Printing. Throughout the thirties his firm specialised in shade cards for J & P Coats and Paton & Baldwins, the thread and yarn manufacturers. His pacifism made him a conscientious objector in 1939, but after a spell in prison the authorities let him return to his useful and harmless profession in a city which was quite unlike the industrially depressed Glasgow of the inter-war years, and even less like the post-industrial Glasgow of today. The government was responsible for this. It had united the country behind its war effort by taking control of all productive industry and land. It ha
d abolished private competition by deliberately paralysing the money market, restricting wages and rents and prices, and by controlling manufacture through agreement with the trade unions. It was also promising a new era of social equality and full employment. This Tory initiative was the foundation of the post-war welfare state, which led to the swinging sixties, which in the Thatcher era was widely advertised as the cause of everything wrong with Britain. But while fighting a Fascist dominated European empire it seemed a good idea: especially in Glasgow which was again at the centre of vigorous mining, steel-producing and shipbuilding communities. It was also Britain’s main transit port. English, Americans and Poles were billeted there.

  This was how Bill met Jadwiga Harasowski. All I know of her is her name and that she got Bill to print Polish classics and newspapers for the Polish troops. It was through her that a commercial printer discovered he had resources to publish books – and in those days he was surrounded by people who wanted them. Without official backing, many arts centres had sprung up in private houses and forces’ service clubs near Sauchiehall Street, and Bill’s office was one of them.

  The best account of it can be found in Joan Littlewood's autobiography, Little Me. Wishing to start a people’s political theatre in 1945, Joan despaired of London and sent scouts around Britain to find somewhere better. I will quote her.

  Jimmie and Bill Douglas skipped to Glasgow one weekend and came back born-again Scots.

  They'd undergone conversion in a river of whisky at 240 Hope Street.

  “What goes on there?”

  “It's William MacLellan's place.”

  “A pub?”

  “A publishing house. Not only is there a poet on every street corner,” said Bill, “but they're all sleeping at MacLellan’s, among the presses, wrapped in their own galley proofs.”

  About the same time The Unity Theatre started the professional careers of Duncan Macrae, Roddy McMillan and other fine actors. Its The Gorbals Story was taken to London, filmed and inspired a Sadler's Wells ballet, with decor by Colquhoun and MacBride who had recently graduated (with Joan Eardley) from Glasgow Art School. The Unity production of Uranium 235 anticipated Oh What A Lovely War and McGrath's The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil. The text was published by MacLellan. The painter J. D. Fergusson and his wife had returned to Glasgow. MacLellan published Fergusson's study of modern Scottish painting: Fergusson designed some covers of MacLellan's magazine Scottish Arts and Letters. His publishing successes were never commercial successes and I suspect the thread manufacturers’ shade cards let the firm last as long as it did.

  But the advertising and distribution of the books was often left to the authors, who resented getting little or no money for them. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s first book contains a story about a hungry young writer failing to get paid by a kilted publisher with clear blue eyes and an absent-minded manner. Bill would describe this story in detail to acquaintances who pretended not to have read it, ending with the remark “... and then I realised this publisher was meant to be me!” The similarity inspired him with a slightly bewildered amazement which was, I think, his main attitude to life. Working in a confused and turbulent period, when hardly any other publishers outside or inside Scotland cared that Scottish arts and letters existed, Bill MacLellan did the best he could for them and lost his family’s profitable little business in the process. We must wait for a thorough history of our native culture before his part in it is properly recognised.

  * This was an obituary in the 1996 Glasgow Herald, here slightly enlarged.

  Working Legs*

  BIRDS OF PARADISE is a professional theatre company providing professional drama training for people with physical disabilities. It also tours with professional productions. Formed in 1989, in 1993 it became a limited company and a registered charity, taking a new name from Ronald Laing’s book Sweet Bird of Paradise which it had partly dramatized. When I was asked to write a play for it in 1996 the Council of Management was as follows:

  Forrest Alexander, wheelchairbound by multiple sclerosis.

  Iain Carmichael, chairman, car salesman with some experience of theatre company management.

  Andrew Dawson, art director and fully qualified drama therapist.

  David Maclean, director at the Alpha Project resource centre for people with disabilities.

  Patsy Morrison, administrator.

  Sylvia Sandeman, paraplegic, disability consultant with Spinal Injuries Scotland.

  Only Mr Dawson and Ms Morrison were salaried.

  The suggestion that I write a play for the company came from Forrest Alexander. He knew me as a novelist and thought that, since novels and plays equally depend on characters, dialogue and settings, any saleable novelist could write a successful play. This is not always true, as Henry James discovered on the first night of his play Guy Domville. Had I only written prose fiction I would have rejected Forrest’s suggestion. However, in the days of a long-forgotten Labour administration I had seven radio, eleven television, four stage plays networked or performed, and was a highly inefficient minutes secretary of The Scottish Society of Playwrights, a small trade union started by CP Taylor and Tom Gallagher. My career as professional dramatist ended in 1978 with the death of Francis Head, my London agent, but I still felt able to write plays so Forrest introduced me to the company.

  From the 6th of June to the 22nd of August I had nine meetings with actors and friends of the company, always at 5pm on Thursdays, always with Andrew Dawson or Patsy Morrison present, and all but once at the company office near Glasgow Cross, in a large room where we sat round a table among the vivid creations of a disabled folks’ art class.

  To the first meeting I brought only one idea. The play must have strong parts for as many disabled actors as possible, so should be set in a world where the able-bodied were a pitiable minority. The company thought this amusing. Forrest Alexander suggested a wheelchair benefit tribunal to which the able-bodied would (unsuccessfully) appeal. Mrs Anne Marie Robertson suggested that the tribunal might be a dumb one which spoke to the appellants through an artificial voice box. This grotesque notion was along lines I wanted, but I needed to know the everyday embarrassments of being disabled so that my able-bodied hero could suffer these also. I was told how hard it is for people in wheelchairs to get service in pubs if not accompanied by an able-bodied friend. Mrs Robertson, who has been wheelchair-bound for many years, spoke of some normal people’s inability to accept that she was married with three children. When asked, “How did you manage that?” she had to smile and shrug her shoulders. She once had to refuse a good job because acceptance meant flitting to a house where light-switches, taps, cooker and other essential things were out of her reach and there was no money to re-equip it.

  At this first meeting I also heard that my idea was not original. Vic Finkelstein, senior lecturer in disability studies at the Open University, had set a story in a village designed for the badly disabled. The able-bodied who cared for them were endangered by low doors, ceilings and wheeltracks linking the buildings. Central Television had issued a video cartoon of this story. It makes the same social point as Working Legs while being more informative about needs of disabled folk, but differs in plot and characters. I have consciously stolen from Mr Finkelstein the low door in scene 2 and Able’s offer to wear a safety helmet.

  A week later I met Alistair Fleming, a student of architecture before being hit by a car. It had left him partly paralysed and had damaged his short-term memory. He knew my novel Lanark because he had read it before the accident and he told me his own story in a jocular way, saying he had been very lucky – in his parents. When hospital treatment stopped doing him good his mother gave up her job to nurse him at home, and both parents had used their savings to fight a long legal battle with the car’s insurance company. They won. Alistair now lives in a house adapted to his needs and employs a truly Christian minder. At a third meeting I met Mrs Alice Thompson who suggested her own medical experience could give my play a h
appy ending. A married woman and working nurse, she had undergone an operation for a heart condition and suffered a stroke during it. She recovered consciousness seven months later without the use of her legs.

  This gallant willingness to make fun of terrible experience made my job easy. I wrote the first two scenes in time for the fourth meeting. From then on we sat round the table reading scenes aloud as they were added and discussing how the play should go. Ernest Kyle, who suffers from emphysema and is also a writer, suggested that Able’s legginess should have led to the breakdown of an earlier marriage. Ernest invented the concept of wheel-training, wrote the tender dialogue which ends scene 4 and gave detailed information upon how our government is deliberately breaking down the social welfare services. As we read on it grew easy to see readers in particular parts. John Campbell seemed right for Able McMann because prosthetic surgery in both legs lets him walk with a completely natural appearance, yet his thoughtful, anxious face indicates life is not easy. Anne Marie seemed suited to the manager or Meg. It was she who suggested Able’s ankles be handcuffed.

  The Birds of Paradise Company has received generous grants from Glasgow City and Scottish Arts Councils. This has helped the company to enlarge its staff and engage with forty-five drama workshops throughout Scotland. The number is growing. These cater for a wide range of disabilities while containing many people without them. At present most of them are rehearsing Working Legs; but the parent company has commissioned a new play from the author Archie Hind which will go into rehearsal when Working Legs goes on tour in 1998.